Michael Golden

Michael Golden is the co-founder and co-CEO of @properties | Christie's International Real Estate, one of the largest independent residential real estate brands in the United States. He grew up in the Boston area and earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and economics from Bates College. He began his professional career in Chicago in the early 1990s as a human resources consultant to Fortune 500 companies, then started selling real estate part-time in the mid-1990s to fund graduate school. His early success selling loft conversions and new construction in Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood redirected his career into real estate full-time.

In 2000, Golden partnered with his office-mate Thaddeus ("Thad") Wong to launch @properties, initially a small operation focused on selling new construction. The two left their prior brokerage frustrated by weak service and support for agents and were reportedly owed roughly $1.5 million in unpaid commissions; they worked without salaries in the early years, reinvesting profits into the business. Over the following two decades they grew @properties into Chicago's largest brokerage by sales volume and a top-10 U.S. brokerage, expanding into prop-tech, mortgage lending, and title services along the way.

In 2021, Golden and Wong acquired Christie's International Real Estate, the global luxury brand with affiliates in nearly 50 countries and territories and roughly $100 billion in average annual network sales volume. Golden has focused heavily on the brand's international operations, overseeing master licensing agreements and new affiliate launches in markets including Japan, Estonia, Italy, Malta, and the Caribbean. In December 2024, Compass announced an agreement to acquire @properties Christie's International Real Estate, folding the combined operation into the Compass platform.

Golden is a past president of the Chicago Association of REALTORS®, a recipient of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award (Midwest, 2013, shared with Wong), and a winner of the Lincoln Park Builders Club Impact Award and the Merrick Momentum Award from Chicago's 1871 entrepreneurial center. He has served on the board of directors of Maryville Academy.

• Invests primarily at pre-seed and seed stages as an individual angel, typically alongside his business partner Thad Wong.
• Strong bias toward prop-tech and real-estate-adjacent tools — lead generation, mortgage, and title/tax technology — often companies whose products his own brokerage can deploy at scale. As Wong framed the First.io deal, he and Golden would "lead the investment effort" and their (then ~2,500-agent) brokerage would also *use* the platform, signaling an operator-investor approach where adoption and capital go together.
• Looks for technology that solves concrete pain points inside the residential real estate workflow (identifying likely sellers, streamlining mortgage/closing, reducing property-tax friction).
• Will also back founders outside real estate opportunistically (e.g., a Chicago healthcare/personalized-medicine network), typically within his Chicago network.
• Investing activity is characterized by aggregators as low-frequency / opportunistic rather than that of a full-time institutional investor.